Did you know that the city spent $59,000 to give free wine to homeless people? Did you know it spends $17,000 giving free cigarettes to the homeless?
Outraged? Rob Ford wants you to be. That’s why he put those items on his City Hall Waste Watch, a running list on his respectfortaxpayers.com website. It’s all part of his pose as the courageous cost cutter who would end the era of waste and extravagance if he is elected mayor. He wants you to think the city is so soft-headed, so indifferent to cost, that it goes around passing out drinks and smokes to street people.
As is nearly always the case with the outrages Mr. Ford uncovers, the reality is different. The wine and cigarettes are part of a harm-reduction strategy at Seaton House, a downtown shelter. One section of that facility is reserved for people with deep-seated addictions. Many have been on the streets for years. Some have debilitating illness stemming from the kind of lives they lead. A good number are in the final stages of life.
This is not a taxpayer-funded booze can. To get on the floor, residents need to have an assessment and undergo treatment. The caring, professional staff at Seaton House allow them regulated amounts of wine and tobacco to ease their pain and prevent them from returning to the streets to use much worse stuff.
It’s far more humane than the old system of scooping the addicted homeless off the street and putting them in a locked room to rant and rave in withdrawal agony. It’s much cheaper than having them go back to the street to look for drugs or alcohol, then end up in the emergency ward time after time.
“You can’t say you don’t want bums on the streets and also say you don’t like this program,” says city budget chief Shelley Carroll. When she toured the harm-reduction floor at Seaton House, she found a quiet, well-run facility full of broken people, including one poor man who was losing the ends of his fingers and toes from a disease that affects those with severe tobacco addiction.
“It’s a tough tour,” she recalls. “You can see that they need that level of care. We’re trying to keep these people as calm and comfortable as they can be, to make their last days humane.”
Mr. Ford must know this. He has been complaining about the free booze and smokes for years. As long ago as 2004, he was calling the idea of handing out cigarettes “sad and sick” and the free wine “scary.” Public health officials have repeatedly explained and defended the program. He continues to raise it year after year regardless, spinning it as a wasteful giveaway.
It plays well to voters who think city hall mollycoddles those on society’s fringes while ignoring the plight of the hard-working, law-abiding taxpayer. But it is a deliberate and cynical misrepresentation of the facts.
There is a lot of that kind of thing in the Ford for Mayor campaign. His website fumes that the city spends $77,000 on watering plants. He’s right. Like most office buildings, city hall pays a person to go around caring for the plants – in this case, a $25.34-an-hour unionized gardener who also tends to plants in Nathan Phillips Square and other downtown city offices. Hardly an example of reckless spending.
He claims the city wasted $200-million by awarding a subway-car contract to Quebec-based Bombardier without competitive bidding. But an evaluation of the deal by two independent consultants determined that the price Toronto paid was in line with, or even below, what other cities were paying for subway cars and that a competitive process would have slowed delivery of the cars without any guarantee of getting a better price. Even Germany-based Siemens only claimed publicly at the time it could save the TTC $100-million, half the figure Mr. Ford tosses about.
Now ask yourself: What’s worth getting most outraged about? A city that gives wine and cigarettes to addicts as part of a humane program of treatment? Or a candidate for mayor who twists the truth to win an election?
